Or he would be, except your story isn't true.
Or he would be, except your story isn't true.
Indeed.Originally Posted by randomlegend
*American
Actually they're playing football, so presumably it's either a woman or an immigrant.
No immigrant would do such thing.
I used to love playing in goal, especially in kickabouts where it doesn't even matter if you concede. Always in the game, don't have to run around, occasionally get to do something spectacular. No idea why everyone hates it so much.
Because I want to play football and run around, not stand around doing nothing. I've been enjoying it a bit more in this place, since it is five a side so there is more action and it is only five minutes at a time but still, rather be on the field.
Perhaps you should've been a surgeon and then you wouldn't have to play in goal.
Starting to sound like this guy has donned you senseless.
There's a guitarist I play with sometimes who says the same thing. It seems fair enough to me. I think he broke a finger going in goal once, but it's only because he's of the very rare breed who actually practice goalkeeping (makes diving saves rather than just halfarsedly attempting to kick shots away).
Last edited by -james-; 26-02-2025 at 02:18 PM.
I never hurt myself diving or charging out, I did fuck my hand once foolishly trying to stretch and palm away an absolute thunderbastard I had no business going for though. It went in regardless.
If they blast them, I just ignore them. No way I'm putting my hand in there .
That is very good.
Living in Tory Malvern I've seen a large amount of Teslas with 'I didn't know he was mental when I bought one' bumper stickers attached to them.
Yeah, I've heard of that although have not seen it in Tory heartland turned lib dem Horsham yet. Did get a pic sent of a Trump flag flying in a small village outside of Brighton. We be deeply fucked.
Measles outbreak in the US now.
Anti-vaxxers really are particularly unbearable in that it's not even them that is the primary victim of their stupidity, it's some poor kid who had no say in the matter.
This is obviously moronic, but insisting people had a Covid vaccine when they manifestly didn't need one has contributed to where we are now and I think it's important that that isn't forgotten.
Which people "manifestly didn't need one"? All the research I've seen is still saying the risk-benefit was in favour of vaccination in all age groups, even children. That's ignoring the benefits to the vulnerable of community immunity, although you may have been in favour of attempting to to euthanise the elderly by pandemic.
Taz "manifestly didn't need one" and ended up with permanent brain damage from covid. That's not me taking the piss, he literally did.
I didn't need a second one yet I was forced to if I wanted to go on holiday.
And more elderly people died catching the fucking thing in 'care' environments than they did by bumping into you or I.
Everything after the first vaccine was a shit show and we fucked up. Hiding behind the 'science' and then wondering why vaccine uptake has diminished is just being wilfully tone deaf.
It actually staggers me that people are still maintaining this view after the practical effect it had in long term vaccine uptake are as clear as day to see. Also not helped by the fact that as far as vaccines go, this one (or the variants thereof) was/were absolute shite.
Staggers me that people are so desperate to feel like they are in the smart group who knows something everyone else doesn't that they no longer see evidence as something with value.
Which is what the anti-vax movement is itself borne out of.
We shouldn't be predicating our response to a pandemic based on what impact it will have on stupid people's vaccine uptake rate.
Last edited by randomlegend; 27-02-2025 at 12:29 AM.
Anyway, I have about as much interest in rehashing this argument as I do deep-frying my own scrotum, so I'm off to bed.
The evidence is bollocks, which is as clear as day to see for anyone who lived through it. If you were elderly, ill, immunocompromised then absolutely - inject it into their nuts - for everyone else it put the scientific method back about forty years.
Which isn't to say that it particularly endangered people who had it, don't get that twisted, I'm not saying that for one minute, but we were told we all needed it when we didn't. It didn't even stop you catching or spreading it FFS.
Just to quote this edit. If we want people to take vaccine uptake as seriously as they should then we absolutely should be. 'Stupid' people make up a significant portion of the population and therefore are crucial to the overall and sustained success of any vaccine programme.
Why do the left or your ilk refuse to be pragmatic? "I'm intelligent, everyone else should be the same, therefore they should do what I do". It's moronic as it absolutely isn't, never has been, nor ever will be, how the majority of humans work and they're not remotely persuaded by that line of thinking. What more evidence is needed to demonstrate that?
EDIT: Actually, maybe they once were but in this post internet age they sure as shit aren't now and we can either put our fingers in our ears or accept it and try and deal with it. I know which approach I'd prefer.
Last edited by Yevrah; 27-02-2025 at 12:49 AM.
Not in America, they've always had an antivaxx movement there.
They have, but the approach to Covid ultimately emboldened that.
Pre-existing condition.
I genuinely had no idea that people still think Covid vaccinations were a waste of time. The clinical trials seems to have been pretty conclusive in their efrectiveness.
Yev didn't die from COVID so it was clearly a waste needing to be vaccinated.
That's the crux of it, yeah. I don't think for one second vaccination mandates should've been on the cards like they were in North America. Vaccination is a choice. It's more often than not the right choice.
People only learn by bad things happening directly to them, and even then it's hit and miss as to whether they learn something useful or 'the right' thing.
I'm not sure anyone really knows how to square the post truth circle. Deceit on an industrial scale has been completely normalised to the point where we've just had a month or so of the absolute maddest shit from the fucking President of America. We're all Waiting for Superman and he isn't coming / he isn't Elon Musk.
This shit is just mad though. He's not even a proper cabinet member and he just stands around lording it over them.
Still surprised Trump and him haven't fallen out yet.
He really doesn't lord it over anyone in that meeting. He's pretty deferential to them all and particularly to Trump.
Although I will concede that dressing like that really doesn't help his cause.
If you criticise Musk in that meeting your cards will be marked, according to the book Character Limit about his Twitter takeover if you get him one on one he is receptive to criticism and pushback on his ideas but if you do it in front of an audience you're committing career suicide.
Vaccination can be a choice for adults; if they wanna take themselves out of the gene pool then all power to them.
The childhood vaccination programme should be made mandatory. As should IM vitamin K at birth.
Putting at risk my sanity, I'm going to engage with you on this in good faith because I'm bored.
When I talk about "the evidence" what that means is that it has been shown - on a population level - that the covid vaccine (even in low risk groups) is of overall benefit.
I think where this falls down is you are purely looking at this from an individual level, which makes it very difficult to see the benefit of these kinds of interventions. This is a very common problem faced in medicine and public health.
Yes, it is very unlikely that you - as an individual - were going to suffer a serious adverse outcome from contracting covid. But when it comes to vaccinating a pandemic, what is important is population level stuff.
Virtually everyone will have contracted covid at some point during the pandemic. That means you are dealing with extremely large numbers of patients, in the order of tens of millions.
The following aren't real numbers for covid because I can't be bothered to dig into them, they are just a worked example to get the point across. But they are probably not wildly unrepresentative.
Say Yevrah's risk of a serious adverse outcome from covid is 1% without vaccination. There's a good chance neither Yevrah nor anybody he knows like him would suffer a serious adverse outcome from covid if they were unvaccinated.
However, there are 10 million Yevrah-like people (i.e low risk adults) in the country. Say vaccinating all the Yevrah's reduces their risk of an adverse outcome by 50% i.e to 0.5% overall.
For an individual Yevrah that doesn't seem very worthwhile. On a population level that's 50,000 Yevrahs. For a health service (particularly one dealing with a pandemic) that is HUGELY significant and it is also hugely significant for those 50,000 Yevrahs. For context, from a quick scan there's roughly 150,00-200,000 ITU admissions in the UK per year.
The covid vaccine has been clearly demonstrated to have been beneficial on that kind of risk-benefit analysis in even low risk patients, even with the benefit of hindsight and post-hoc analysis. Remember that these decisions weren't even taken with that benefit, it was people trying to establish the best thing to do on a population level with incomplete data, little time and a new illness. The evidence is they absolutely got it right.
This is why we do things like the newborn screening. Do you know anyone with glutaric aciduria type 1 or medium chain acyl-coA dehydrogenase deficiency? No you don't. But we still screen ALL neonates for them. Why? Because on a population level, the risk benefit equation is in favour of doing so.
To make a slightly more flippant point, you also were vaccinated. You don't know what would've happened to you if you weren't; it's perfectly possible you could've lost your sense of smell forever or had an ITU admission. Vaccination is not a major or unpleasant intervention. Even if the absolute risk reduction is small on a personal level, I'd still argue it makes no sense not to have it given it all it subjects you to is about two seconds of very minor pain and maybe 24-48 hours of feeling a bit under the weather.
Last edited by randomlegend; 27-02-2025 at 01:52 PM.
That's an excellent post and a very well constructed argument. if the evidence shows that vaccinating each indvidual age group (in and of itself) was beneficial, then fine, I stand corrected. If I've read your post correctly this is what I think you're saying.
If however the evidence shows that it was beneficial to vaccinate everyone as one group (with the vulnerable getting huge benefit, the not vulnerable getting none/a negative benefit but a net benefit overall) then I'm much less convinced.
If we went with the first approach for the second vaccine (I'm absolutely fine with everyone having the first btw) then I don't quite get why we were still giving it to 18 year olds. If the answer is because there was a net benefit of doing so across that whole age group, why did we then pull back from continuing to vaccinate actual kids?
An excellent post.
It is, isn't it. I guess my other beef with the whole thing was the messaging around it (particularly at the second vaccine stage), but I suspect the medical people would have loved to relay it in the way RL has, but were overruled by people who thought we'd get better uptake if we strong armed/guilt tripped people into doing it. Which, given how much I bang on about pragmatism, has me squarely hoisted by my own petard if that is the case.
Yes, the evidence is of benefit in all adult age groups.
The "actual kids" question is more difficult to answer. The serious adverse outcomes become so rare once you get to down to that age group (you're talking 1 in hundreds of thousands or even millions for risk of death) that the benefit is less clear. We also didn't have the same concerted effort to vaccinate all children in the same way so we don't have the same quality and quantity of data. Paediatric care is also essentially entirely separate to adult care so the strain on the system was less of a concern (and the absolute numbers were much smaller both because the risk is lower and there's less children). My understanding is it's probably still an unanswered question but one that's probably not all that important to answer.
Last edited by randomlegend; 27-02-2025 at 05:36 PM.
Vaccinating a child is probably more of a traumatic thing than vaccinating an adult, that alone should [and probably was] part of the overall calculation.
I think one of the main problems is that people are often unable to realise that evidence based decisions are preferable even if they end up being wrong [not saying that applies to covid or vaccines generally] than the often more conspiratorial alternatives, as they give you no basis for making sensible decisions in the first place or going forward. It's like predicting a stock market crash. Anyone can do it, and it will eventually happen, but the skill is in knowing when - I think people struggle with this and you just end up with "well X has been saying this for years" or "X was right all along" when there was no foundational reason for that rightness so it was essentially meaningless at best and dangerous/harmful at worst.
Last question and we can probably put this to bed on this forum once and for all. Why when the South African variant came along did the scientific community over here collectively shit itself, wanting us all back indoors/having no fun, despite the South African scientific community saying it was manifestly fine? Which it turned out to be.
Yes I wanted to make this point but wasn't sure how to word it in a way which did it justice.
In my opinion, even if it turned out that the vaccine was not particularly beneficial in younger people with the benefit of post-hoc analysis of the data, I would still think it was the right thing to have done at the time.
Decisions had to be taken on the basis of the evidence we had and when you have incomplete evidence you have to use a degree of extrapolation and...I guess educated intuition.
We were in a position where it was so important to get things under control that if our extrapolation turned out to be slightly wrong for one age group, that would have been an acceptable "mistake".
Monitoring of adverse effects of the vaccine was ongoing constantly so if there'd have been a major problem in a certain age group that would've been picked up.
Last edited by randomlegend; 27-02-2025 at 04:10 PM.
That's probably a question you'd need a virologist to answer. My vaguely educated guess would be that you can't automatically assume a variant will behave the same in a new population as it does in the one in which it arose.
I think ultimately there was a (correct in my opinion) feeling that it was better to over-egg the initial response and then back off if things were less bad than you thought than it was to under-egg it and then be trying to reel back in something that's run away from you.
Another excellent post.
Just to come back to this; the way you have to think about how people were making these decisions is again all about risk-benefit.
"What if we're wrong?"
If they recommended vaccinating young people and they're wrong, what were the likely consequences? In all likelihood, it would simply be a lack of benefit or at worst a small amount of harm from vaccine side effects outweighing the reduction in serious covid outcomes. It was very unlikely there was going to be huge harm from some unforeseen vaccine side effect which only happens in young people, and even if that became apparent it was being heavily monitored for and could be stopped.
If they recommended against vaccinating young people and they're wrong, what were the likely consequences? Probably catastrophic. If significant numbers of young people were suffering serious outcomes from covid because of not being vaccinated, that would've been disastrous both on an individual level and a healthcare provision level given the stress on the system at the time. If it turned out unvaccinated young people were just a big vector of transmission to the vulnerable (which they probably weren't, but we didn't know that at the time and based our thinking on what happens with other viruses) then again; disastrous. Etc etc.
These were very difficult decisions made based on incomplete knowledge and data, and that means sometimes you have to hedge for what you believe has the least likelihood of terrible outcome based on what you do know from the data you do have and your knowledge about similar entities.
Last edited by randomlegend; 27-02-2025 at 04:46 PM.
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